@Actually, autoland exists

"because you look like such a fool if you turn it on and it crashes your plane",

not half as much of a prat as you look when you f*ck up a landing that the plane could have done by itself.

See here the difference between British pragmatism and American ego.

Brit: "It should work, If I don't use it and I crash, that's my fault, if I use it and IT crashes it's someone elses fault."

Yank: "If I don't use it (and IF don't crash) everyone will think my cock's bigger, and that's far more important than my or anyone elses safety"

Couple more thoughts

Taking over remote control probably isn't easy - I am sure it's encrypted and probably more... But jamming them by overloading the sensors and sending garbage signals is a distinct possibility...

Another interesting point here is that it makes it very easy to mask the source of the bombs. Capture a soldier or bomber or agent and it is not that hard to find out which country he is working for. Send remote control bombers against a target and even if you shoot one down no-one can tell who sent it (once they become more common, that is..).

And when NGOs are able to produce them, we are in deep doo-doo. Suicide bombers are a problem, but remote controled kamikaze planes without a pilot are much worse...

Latency, and politics

I was anticipating something more autonomous than "fly by radio" remote control. I had in mind something that incorporated the sort of terrain recognition ability of a quality cruise missile into a reusable weapons platform.

For attacking buildings & infrastructure & fairly easily identified things like armour and automobiles, this would seem to be the way to go.

My main objection, not well stated above, is that such weapons remove pretty much any reason for domestic political opposition to a war - officially declared or unofficially declared. The only time (so it seems to me) most countries start to seriously object to fighting a war is when the cost in lives or gold rises too high.

Robotic weapons remove the variable of dead military personnel, and I do not believe the US economy would much notice production of these things (what do current stealth bombers cost anyway?)

Therefore these weapons become very very easy to use. As such they constitute as much a political change vis a vis war as they do a military one.

The point that countries do not surrender to air forces has some truth, but it is only relevant if the goal of a war is to force a surrender. Students of history know well that war and military force has often been used to force economic concessions (examples: China vs gunboat diplomacy from Europe initially and then later also the USA & Japan, from about 1800 to 1945; Japan vs the USA and US gun boat diplomacy opening Japan to foreign mostly US trade; the development of the British Empire in India; ...go read all about it). You don't need to win to dominate, control and extract profits from a target.

This kind of weaponry is perfect for gunboat (if you will) diplomacy: no political cost at home, quite possible to use without even informing the domestic polity, terrifying and largely unanswerable militarily force to the target country. I gotta ask, what else would you want to use this tech for?

And, it's not that I think the USA gov't is especially vulnerable to the temptation these would represent: Canada, if we had 'em, would behave badly too, as would most countries. But, well, it seems the US is the country most interested in acquiring the tech, so it got the heat.

The Reg is nominally a tech rag, so I will shut up now.